The government should receive limited power and freedom from the people and not the other way around...

Maxims, rules of thumb and other observations on human cognition and sociocultural affectations

This will be added to on an irregular basis...

What is said to humans directly is received with skepticism and considered with dubiousness while that which is heard in passing, especially that which most conforms to their mentality or prejudices, is readily believed.

Humans have a certain cognitive latency between exposure to new information or experiences and the ability to think dispassionately and intellectually about it.

Humans have a certain cognitive spectrum starting with the moment of exposure to new information or experiences and ending with some point at which the thing is effectively "in the past" for them.

This cognitive spectrum is linked to the emotional process often referred to as shock, anger, denial and acceptance.

The more and faster information or experiences are presented to people and the closer the quarters and the lesser the distance between people, the more their early reactions in the passionate emotional stage are reflected back to them in the manner of responses to those reactions from others in light of those responses.

The more outrages which are suffered without sufficient time to allow emotional bleed-off, the farther the bar for subsequent reaction and outrage are pushed, and the more further events must progress before reaction and outrage.

It is possible for serious detriments to eventually sit below this threshold for long enough for their damaging effects to build and multiply until their entire society undergoes some reactive convulsion.

Monday, December 31, 2007

NEW YORK (AP) Netscape Navigator, the world's first commercial Web browser and the launch pad of the Internet boom, will be pulled off life support Feb. 1 after a 13-year run.

In other related news Scott McNealy, Marc Andreessen, and Larry Ellison were revealed to have been brain-dead and on life support themselves for many many years, but that life support would continue for them despite it being fairly evident that their failure to carpe diem way back when against a demonstrably screwed up Windows for Workgroups 3.11 and Windows 95 constituted a professional and intellectual blue screen of death.

Nevertheless, well wishers are advised to send condolence gifts to the not-yet-deceased by buying their products and services out of sympathy to the stockholders unfortunately still burdened by their dubious leadership.

It was this post at Lakewood Shmuck. If you read the first five comments, mine would have been six. Mine was six actually, but here's what I would have posted had I not said, "hmmm... maybe it belongs in my blog..."

Which party is selling more lies, more despair, and less hope? Hands down, that's the Democrats. They're the party of selfishness, think only of yourself, talk big about multiculturalism but in reality look down on them, etc.

The Dems are the ones who cozy up to people who throw stones at organized religion when it is Christians and then in the same breath defend Christians, but damn them with mealy-mouth backhanded praise, and mostly those that send them money. Hypocrites have no better model than them.

You think those same people won't eventually pillory Jews and Muslims too? They already patronize them, and encourage their youth to abscond away from the faiths, ridicule is coming. The average liberal thinks you're stupid to believe in G-d. Well, subconsciously that's because it profits them more to get you to believe in them. I was raised in poverty and take it from me, they aren't selling help, they're selling desperate dependency.

On the other hand you have the Republicans who are like your refrigerator contents through a blender for five minutes and don't know what they want to be and have had anything they had good to sell hijacked by Bush's neocons and sullied... Even the high lord of Democratic politics, JFK, was in favor of low taxes and low spending, and less government. Now he's been rewritten into a socialist. However, those ideas work when not sabotaged by one side or another. Bush's biggest failure is precisely his lack of taking charge and letting slimy leeches run the show.

I wish Connecticut's governor Jodi Rell was running. Or Joseph Lieberman. Someone I respect or can at least tolerate. I wonder if they'll have a "None of the Above" entry this year...

BTW, America first sort of feelings were what delayed the US entry into WWII more than anything else. If it wasn't for the US entering at all, Nazi Germany would have taken England within a few more months, established a solid presence, and become a fact of life in the world too late to go to war to erase without greater loss than had they done it earlier. AND the horrors of the holocaust would have been buried and erased if they'd been given more time.

Lastly, liberalism of today is NOT what it was many decades ago. It is a hellish pot of reeking sewage of socialism, leftist theorizing, and above all else, empowering someone other than you. Anyone who'd try to convince an American that the rights enumerated in the Bill of Rights aren't pre-existing natural if not G-d given rights and NOT privileges handed out by a benevolent state is selling lies.

Put another way, how would you like a movement that tried to sell young Jews the idea that their life and all the goodness in it wasn't something courtesy of a benevolent and loving G-d, but actually privileged good times courtesy of the government?

Man did that comment chain rankle. Here's my comment I put in.

Whoever Wins, We Lose. So sayeth the Aliens Versus Predator poster of great wisdom.

Remember the first rule of politics and worthiness: no one who would accept the job deserves it and those who actively seek it doubly so.

Also before anyone gets their knickers in a twist over the Repos, the Dems are the party that wants you to believe the Bill of Rights is a Bill of Privileges Thanks to a Benevolent State. Side with them, and your freedom of religion will be sooner or later history as the religion of liberals is politics and the gods of it themselves and they cannot abide or suffer competition. Refer to line one.

NEVER make the mistake of thinking that liberalism is okay or can be reformed. It CAN'T as long as it pretends to be what it isn't and that's kind, generous, good, loving, holy, understanding, equitable, egalitarian, enlightened, etc.

This is EXACTLY why you should look askance at rabbis and priests who in response to your questions either infer or tell you directly that you should shut up and accept their wisdom. G-d's power needs no fear, needs no defense by mere mortals against it. In a world of primitive superstition and fear, of bloody human and other sacrifices did spring up the idea that there was one G-d, and that G-d was paying attention, and being good and righteous mattered. So powerful was He, that His word pushed through the grime and blood of our primitive ancestors' world.

SO, never fear to explore, question, and learn for yourself. G-d doesn't fear that, neither should you. You think Orthodoxy seems questionable sometimes? Liberalism is Orthodoxy Ultra Unleaded. You don't want to trade one for another. Especially one that transfers the ultimate position of power from your free will governed by your conscience under G-d to the proven wrong political imaginings of self-aggrandizing faithless fools.

This band's work rocks, rocks hard, and in a way you thought was dead and buried. It has the soul and strength that sounds of those with true passion for the moment of the song. In acting some actors are so good at what they do, for the time of the play they ARE that character. In music, the analogue is what we get with Black Stone Cherry.

I'm really happy with their work and looking forward to more. With the recent resurgence of adult contemporary alternative music, with the continued post-Audioslave work of Chris Cornell as well as the Foo Fighters still performing, I think the market could be ripe for them.

Thursday, December 27, 2007

Haqqani, now a professor at Boston University, isn't sure what the latest bloodshed means for his country. "Will the Pakistani military realize that this is going to tear the fabric of the nation apart, and so really get serious about securing the country and about getting serious in dealing with the extremist jihadis?" he wondered. But he made clear he feels the best chance for such a policy has just evaporated. "She did show courage, and she was the only person who spoke out against terrorism," he said.

"She was let down by those in Washington who think that sucking up to bad governments around the world is their best policy option.

Wednesday, December 26, 2007

...if you bend over for your customers, then the only customers you will have are those who want you to bend over. If bending over is your whole raison d'etre, hey, more power to you. If not, then how is it serving you? How is it serving them?

There's a difference between going the extra mile for someone, and going down on someone.

The plan called for the FBI to apprehend all potentially dangerous individuals whose names were on a list Hoover had been compiling for years.

"The index now contains approximately twelve thousand individuals, of which approximately ninety-seven percent are citizens of the United States," Hoover wrote in the now-declassified document. "In order to make effective these apprehensions, the proclamation suspends the writ of habeas corpus.

If you thought Hoover was just a simple nutjob who abused his office and the Constitution of the United States of America to fulfill his petty kinkiness, oh no... He was a complex and farsighted nutjob who abused his office and the Constitution of the United States of America to fulfill his petty kinkiness and threaten the fabric of the public life altogether.

Friday, December 14, 2007

The negotiating agenda set at Bali, and the results of two years of negotiations to follow, will help determine for decades how well the world can hold down its rising temperatures.

It can't. Again, people are missing simple logic. There are ice ages. By simple inferences there must be other ages that are NOT ice by contrast or there's no point in call an age an ice age because there would be no other age type to give it definition.

If there's light, there must be something we call... dark.

So if we're coming out of an ice age into a not-ice age, why all the consternation? It's not science, it's do-it-yourself religion dressed up as science. Like the paganism extolled from supposed spell books at Borders Books in the wake of every Harry Potter film, it's a pop fad.

Only a few decades ago, they told us we were headed back into an ice age. Scientifically, I'll tell you that is most likely from the Vostok ice cores. The graph of temperature variations recorded there shows that as the world warms at the end of an interglacial, the warming rate increases. It's not a simple flat line or a graceful sin(x) curve.

So if you're not a toadstool or rutabaga, it might occur to you that it sounds like it is self-enhancing somehow. That the warmer it gets, the easier it gets to get warmer. Yes, it is. Why? Because a bigger contributor to greenhouse warming than mankind is all around you every day: plant life.

No, I don't mean that plants put out CO2 directly in massive amounts, though they do to some degree. I mean the aftermath of plant life. Mulch.

When plant life decays, a plethora of microbes and simple cellular life feeds upon the matter and each other and each other's dead forms. This incestuous little world of everything feeding on everything else is what we call decomposition. Happens to animal remains like yours when you die, happens to dead grass blades, dead insects, etc.

One of the outputs is CO2. Another is methane which is an even better greenhouse gas than CO2. These processes are constant. As the Earth warms, ice melts, the line of green growing things moves north and south (depending on the side of the equator) and uphill towards the mountain tops.

More plants, more mulch, more greenhouse gases. Soon it gets to a critical point and the world heads towards cold again.

Back to the story. They held it someplace warm. Bali. Hmmm... How warm is Bali? This is how warm Bali is. That's about 80° F for those not on the metric system. Where will they hold it next?

The Europeans and others showed little enthusiasm for this "voluntary" approach, and environmentalists denounced it as an effort to subvert the U.N. climate treaty process. It remains to be seen whether EU countries will attend the next meeting, in Honolulu in late January.

Honolulu has these average temperatures. Of course holding a global warming conference in Buffalo, NY in January would just not have the same effect, would it? They might actually start thinking that not everywhere on Earth is warm or warm year round. Yes, there are seasons, variations... What else might people learn if they asked questions?

This is what the SAFE Act requires: Anyone providing an "electronic communication service" or "remote computing service" to the public who learns about the transmission or storage of information about certain illegal activities or an illegal image must (a) register their name, mailing address, phone number, and fax number with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children's "CyberTipline" and (b) "make a report" to the CyberTipline that (c) must include any information about the person or Internet address behind the suspect activity and (d) the illegal images themselves. (By the way, "electronic communications service" and "remote computing service" providers already have some reporting requirements under existing law too.)

"Who learns about" means if they do not learn then it doesn't apply to them, right? No, since our police state always assumes only head cheese could not possibly know and actively ignores that our mass media culture encourages people to effectively be as smart as head cheese (in their world, all television is Masterpiece Theater, Cliff Notes do not exist, and you are born a genius and sage and therefore have no excuse to not know, at least when it comes to your culpability in anything, never theirs).

Furthermore, you must implicate yourself by part (a) since you provided them the means to do it and the law in no way holds you harmless hence you are automatically open to being charged as an accessory.

Part (b) interestingly forces you to report yourself to a private NGO whose outlook is that you are a child molester unless G-d tells them personally, big tall beardy white guy in robes and everything, that you're not.

Part (c) goes with what I said about the assumption of your guilt. You better damn well come up with something to hang on someone else or it's your network info they are left with.

Part (d) even better yet enshrines in law that you must violate another law and must transmit copies of the illegal images to that private NGO. So you will have to posses them which is illegal, and then retransmit them, which is also illegal. You're forced to implicate yourself as an accessory, snitch on the other guy to cover your ass, then re-implicate yourself directly by committing the same crime.

Wow! We're going to fight crime by ordering you to report the crime, then perform the crime to justify reporting yourself after the fact!

Oh, but it gets better:

The definition of which images qualify as illegal is expansive. It includes obvious child pornography, meaning photographs and videos of children being molested. But it also includes photographs of fully clothed minors in overly "lascivious" poses, and certain obscene visual depictions including a "drawing, cartoon, sculpture, or painting." (Yes, that covers the subset of anime called hentai).

For the record, courts have held that hentai, while distasteful, is not in fact actionable. Were they to do so, furry fandom (look it up, I dare you) would replace Al Queda as public enemy organization number one.

As one poster in the comments put it, the alternative is to report every single piece of information, image, etc. and bury them in it. Another one would be for an enterprising ne'er do well to write a viral worm that distributed kiddie pron images like spam.

However, I think that yet again, this shows we're going to have to fight back ala Ghost In The Shell with cyber-revolution and hide everything, even when there's nothing to hide, simply because it is our nothing.

This quote is important I feel:

V: Good evening, London. Allow me first to apologize for this interruption. I do, like many of you, appreciate the comforts of every day routine- the security of the familiar, the tranquility of repetition. I enjoy them as much as any bloke. But in the spirit of commemoration, thereby those important events of the past usually associated with someone's death or the end of some awful bloody struggle, a celebration of a nice holiday, I thought we could mark this November the 5th, a day that is sadly no longer remembered, by taking some time out of our daily lives to sit down and have a little chat. There are of course those who do not want us to speak. I suspect even now, orders are being shouted into telephones, and men with guns will soon be on their way. Why? Because while the truncheon may be used in lieu of conversation, words will always retain their power. Words offer the means to meaning, and for those who will listen, the enunciation of truth. And the truth is, there is something terribly wrong with this country, isn't there? Cruelty and injustice, intolerance and oppression. And where once you had the freedom to object, to think and speak as you saw fit, you now have censors and systems of surveillance coercing your conformity and soliciting your submission. How did this happen? Who's to blame? Well certainly there are those more responsible than others, and they will be held accountable, but again truth be told, if you're looking for the guilty, you need only look into a mirror. I know why you did it. I know you were afraid. Who wouldn't be? War, terror, disease. There were a myriad of problems which conspired to corrupt your reason and rob you of your common sense. Fear got the best of you, and in your panic you turned to the now high chancellor, Adam Sutler. He promised you order, he promised you peace, and all he demanded in return was your silent, obedient consent. Last night I sought to end that silence. Last night I destroyed the Old Bailey, to remind this country of what it has forgotten. More than four hundred years ago a great citizen wished to embed the fifth of November forever in our memory. His hope was to remind the world that fairness, justice, and freedom are more than words, they are perspectives. So if you've seen nothing, if the crimes of this government remain unknown to you then I would suggest you allow the fifth of November to pass unmarked. But if you see what I see, if you feel as I feel, and if you would seek as I seek, then I ask you to stand beside me one year from tonight, outside the gates of Parliament, and together we shall give them a fifth of November that shall never, ever be forgot.

This is where we are headed in this country and in this world. We are letting the political class rob us of our G-d-given right to something better and they are doing it by trading fear for it and we all know after we've walked out of the dentist's office, fear is ephemeral and gone soon. We get nothing, and they get to speak for us, the decide for us, to choose for us.

We get nothing.

Further:

Valerie: It seems strange that my life should end in such a terrible place, but for three years I had roses and apologized to no one. I shall die here. Every inch of me shall perish. Every inch, but one. An inch. It is small and it is fragile and it is the only thing in the world worth having. We must never lose it or give it away. We must NEVER let them take it from us. I hope that whoever you are, you escape this place. I hope that the worlds turns, and that things get better. But what I hope most of all is that you understand what I mean when I tell you that, even though I do not know you, and even though I may never meet you, laugh with you, cry with you, or kiss you, I love you. With all my heart, I love you.

BitTorrent is just the beginning. Onward comes the storm of the cyber rebellions, the people fighting back against the cancer of conformity for the sake of mere survival on our knees as slaves to other men, the intellectual battles to get through the fog of laziness and fear. Onward comes the future. Onward comes the distributed net. Onward comes the blizzard.

I warned you, but you wouldn't listen. You'll just have to wait and see how it will play. I'll have nothing to do with its creation or design, but I can guarantee you it is coming. As Agent Smith would say, "not impossible... INEVITABLE."

I love the morally clueless and totally openly avaricious nature of this line:

"I didn't hear from them then," she said. "If this money gets held up, it's very detrimental to what we're trying to do."

Because as we all know, the righteousness of your idea trumps the wrongness of using the police powers of the state to sack other people to pay for it.

Oh wait, they call that "The Ends Justify The Means" theory and it is universally held as morally repugnant. Well, universally as in everywhere outside of the spiritual space beyond the event horizon of politics.

Who is the bigger sinner? The stripper who merely shares the sight of her nude body or the crusader who uses the state to steal what doesn't belong to them and wasn't given freely based on the holy effrontery that their ideas are sacrosanct and beyond questioning and by doing so paints the common man as too stupid to be able to see it right or wrong for themselves, and those who promote the idea as being too holy to question.

Oh yes, you're using the money for "sexual assault prevention"... which will be done in what more effective way than the totally ineffective ways you've already failed at so far in your attempts at lying to the people that you're going to save them from themselves and secondly that they even need it, and thirdly that they need it from you?

Oh yes of course, there's the health care for the uninsured which already ostensibly exists and doesn't work either.

As I've said repeatedly people, the reason it doesn't work is not because of opposition and intransigence, and not because of a faulty premise and plan: IT IS BECAUSE THEY WERE NEVER TRYING TO SAVE YOU FROM YOURSELVES, GIVE YOU HEALTH CARE, PROP YOU UP ABOVE DESTITUTION WITH WELFARE, SAVE YOU FROM SEXUAL ABUSE, OR ANY OTHER SUCH THING.

What were they doing? Getting more power over you. One bit of power over you after another until neither you nor anyone else can remember ever not being under someone else's thumb. Until you work for the state, are owned by the state, and are circumscribed in all things by the state.

If you think that I fault only liberals... NO, I FAULT YOU. YOU for letting liberals do it, then conservatives, then independents, and all the others in turn, and you did it because they bribed you with promises that they never fucking delivered. You sold out yourselves and your descendants with not even thirty pieces of silver to show for it. HOW FUCKING STUPID ARE YOU???

All because they promised to screw someone else over more than you. Because they promised that those others being screwed would translate to more in your pockets, your hands. Because you believed lies that a five year old can see through. Because you believed in darkness and doubt. Because you believed them when they sold the world to you as a zero sum game. Because you believed that there was no hope. Because you believed it was expedient. Because you believed in them, obvious liars and charlatans, more than you believed in yourself, your spouse, your mate, your kids, your anything...

It is you the common person who has let this happen and you the common person who has sold us out. If you want a traitor in our midst, an anti-Christ, a Judas, a Satan, GO LOOK IN THE MIRROR. They are staring right back at you.

Sadly, so too is the messiah and sadder still is that all you see is the former and not the latter and you comfort yourself with the lie that you could not have done better when all you had to do was choose to.

That's why the age of moshiach is not in the offing. Salvation isn't predicated on need, it's predicated on ability to say enough is enough and choose differently. If you will not even in your heads and hearts do that much, just say no to yourself, then you are lost. We all are.

I plan to keep on believing somehow some way something I say will spark something in someone and they will say something that sparks a thing in someone else as it was in me when someone before said something that made a spark in me.

I plan to continue like Malcolm Reynolds. I plan to misbehave. I plan to continue like George Bernard Shaw. I plan on being the unreasonable man. I plan to continue like the Maccabees. I plan to revolt. I plan to continue like Popeye the Sailor Man. I plan to not stands no more. I plan to continue like the guy on the corner with the sign that says the world is coming to an end. I plan to tell you when shit is wrong.

Wednesday, December 05, 2007

Hello, Earth? YOUR ICE AGE IS OVER! PUT DOWN THE SNOW SHOES AND STEP AWAY FROM THE SNOW SHOVEL. PREPARE FOR WARMER WEATHER!

In a world where we are told breathlessly by brainless idiots that we dare not endanger the world with the sci-fi movie theoretical perils of genetic engineering, i.e. we dare not genetically tamper with cells to force them into stem cell format to make whatever cells we need to save the lives of the people from whom we take the cells... we are being asked to consider genetically re-engineering sheep and cows to be more like kangaroos.

Oh wait, it gets better.

Another group of scientists, meanwhile, has suggested Australians should farm fewer cattle and sheep and just eat more kangaroos.

Australians exhale CO2... should we just eat Australians and kill the whole problem all at once?

Since when should the USA be capturing foreign nationals on their own soil outside of enemy combatants in a declared war, and then removing them to a third location under USA control in the first place?

First of all know that I do not dispute that there are dangerous terrorist organizations in existence on Earth and that they have a vested interest in planning and executing attacks on civilians and generally causing havoc to the common peace based on their politics and mentality.

I do not dispute that the United Nations spends more of its time talking about doing things about terrorism than ever acting against said terrorists.

I do not dispute that the USA has a vested interest in attacking and removing said terrorists.

I do dispute that the USA should be holding those terrorists and apply American law to them without American legal protections.

Unfortunately, the USA's refusal to cooperate with the UN in any way regarding hammering out international laws and treaties regarding war criminals and international courts has tied off that avenue: we should be handing the terrorists over the UN control and the UN should be imprisoning these criminals against the common peace of Earth pending trial and sentence for their crimes.

Even more unfortunately, the political arms of these terrorists are adept at playing semantic and logic games of straw men and apples and oranges at the UN and the various nations that stand as proxies for them out of their own interests in getting whatever it is they want out of the USA or its allies. Heck, some of their witting or unwitting national cohorts ARE American allies.

Given that, I think the solution is obvious: capture and release... right into the UN itself in Geneva. Scoop them up, drop them off out front of the UN offices gift-wrapped.

It's either that or give them the same rights as any other arrested and detained prisoners we have in our own legal system... which would show the world that we are better because let's face it the SAS or Mossad would simply interrogate right then and there and then put a bullet in their heads, the Russians wouldn't even bother with the interrogation and just go to machine-gunning them... They'd see the higher quality of our prison systems compared to theirs... They'd be exposed to a plethora of other cultures like the Aryan Nations, the Skinheads, the Hell's Angels, and all the other prison gangs...

I'm not seeing the problem with going either way. I do see a problem with this stupid pointless obstructionist mentality of the current administration. It's a fait accompli that things will change with the next presidency. If a new method is to be instituted, let it be by this administration instead right now.

Catch and release or upgrade them to full American federal prison system inmates.

Monday, December 03, 2007

The findings suggest that dark matter particles interacted so that they "annihilated" each other, producing subatomic particles called quarks and their antimatter counterparts, antiquarks. This annihilation produced heat that would have kept the proto-stellar cloud of hydrogen and helium from cooling and shrinking and thus preventing fusion reactions from igniting.

"Dark matter particles"? WTF are they? Well, they're something invented (read pulled out of someone's ass) to account for their previous ideas about the universe being so sacrosanct that when the observations still didn't match, they had to fudge with exotic made-up nonsense.

And atheists say science doesn't involve faith in ridiculous things that not only are disproved by attempts to prove them, but inherently so... As in, every attempt at finding dark matter has totally failed to find any but usually ends up with in-your-face corrections to existing scientific theories and calculations, aka refinements.

Science is now firmly a Flying Spaghetti Monster invention... as if the whole "global warming is unnatural and created by mankind" guff wasn't enough for you.

Well, this editor also lets me insert book links to Amazon, maps, and let's be use right to left languages like Hebrew and Arabic properly.

I can even put in website captures if I want.

Unlike ScribeFire, it doesn't insist on bothering the reader with a "Powered by" entry. How cool is that? Yeah, you doubters would expect MS to insist on it. Nope.

All in all, I am very happy so far with this. Not too damn bad for BETA. AND... they openly call it that rather than selling it as finished product and slipping by the testing making me a guinea pig. Guess someone at Redmond realized Windows 95 chief mistake finally.